HS ‘Snap’s up stock and makes millions
A California high school raked in millions by investing in Snapchat back when few people had heard of the app — thanks to one teenage girl who convinced her dad it was the next big thing, sources said Friday.
Saint Francis HS, a private Catholic school in the Bay Area city of Mountain View, bought $15,000 in shares of the popular messaging app five years ago and sold two-thirds of them for $24 million Thursday, reps from the school said.
“It’s a dream come true. We’re all so grateful,” Saint Francis executive director Holly Elkins told The Post.
The school got the bright idea to invest in the then-little-known app from parent Barry Eggers, who noticed his daughter playing with it in early 2012, reps from the school said.
Eggers came home from work one night and spotted his daughter, Natalie, and her friends fiddling with their phones and cracking up.
“He saw them all sitting around the kitchen table, playing with it. He asked her, ‘What’s that?’ And she told him, ‘Everybody’s doing it, Dad. Don’t you know?’ ” Elkins said.
Eggers hadn’t heard of Snapchat, so he started doing research. He and a partner from his firm, Lightspeed Ventures, tracked down Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, who was then running the business out of a cramped college dorm at Stanford.
Eggers soon persuaded Saint Francis — which had an investment program in place to raise money for education — to buy shares of the stock.
Snapchat’s team gave an IPO presentation to reps from the school, which included bankers and other venture capitalists, and helped seal the deal.
But Saint Francis president Simon Chiu wasn’t sure about it at first, he admitted.
“It was a little bit like being a fish out of water for me,” Chiu told CNNTech. “I’m an educator. It’s not what I do.”
But the risk paid off, he said. Now, the school plans to use its influx of wealth to “retain the best teachers with great salaries” and “to make tuition affordable for students who need financial help,” Elkins said.
On Thursday, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, made its trading debut at more than $24 a share. The initial share price, $17, skyrocketed 44 percent when trading began.
Snap stock closed at $27.09 a share on Friday. The school still owns 600,000 shares, which are now worth about $16 million.
“Our kids are understanding that it’s pretty exciting to live out in Silicon Valley,” said Chiu. “It’s hard to imagine it happening anywhere else.”